Two horrific crimes against pregnant women in Greece have led to calls for femicide to be recognized as a specific criminal act.
In the first case, a 41-year-old woman who was three months pregnant was murdered by her partner and his friend. The woman, who local media reports have identified as Georgia, had gone missing from Thessaloniki on New Year’s Day, and her body was found days later in a remote area of Halkidiki in northern Greece.
According to one of the perpetrators, the two men waited for the woman to arrive at her partner’s apartment, where they ambushed her. She was gagged and handcuffed, and then taken to the bathroom, where they stabbed her repeatedly. Her body was put into a trunk before they tossed it away. One of the men — Georgia’s partner and father of her preborn child — had been accused of raping his sister in 2022.
After killing her, they stole 80 euros from her. Before the murder, the woman had complained of abusive behavior from her partner and had filed several lawsuits against him. Both men are facing charges of murder, termination of pregnancy, robbery, illegal possession and use of a weapon.
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The second instance involved a 45-year-old Roma woman in Zefyri; while there aren’t as many details available, what is known is that her husband doused her with a flammable material and set her on fire. Though she survived, she suffered burns over 90% of her body.
Both crimes have led to calls for femicide — a hate crime in which women or girls are killed specifically due to their gender — to be added to the Greek criminal code. “We have a femicide and an attempt [at femicide] in the first ten days of 2024, with the perpetrators being the husbands of the victims. The intensity and violence of the two brutal crimes are appalling,” Natasa Kefallinou, from Diotima, a Greek women’s non-profit specializing in gender and equality issues, told Balkan Insight. “The perpetrator in Thessaloniki in fact had a history of abusing other women but continued to abuse undisturbed.”
Balkan Insight reported that 9,139 women were victims of gender-based violence in 2023 alone.
